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Synthetic Cubism at War: New Necessities, New Challenges

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RIHA Journal 0250 | 02 September 2020 Synthetic Cubism at War: New Necessities, New Challenges. Concerning the Consequences of the Great War in the Elaboration of a Synthetic-Cubist Syntax Belén Atencia Conde-Pumpido Abstract When we talk about the Synthetic Cubism period, what exactly are we referring to? What aesthetic possibilities and considerations define it insofar as its origin and later evolution are concerned? To what extent did the disorder that the Great War unleashed, with all its political, sociological and moral demands, influence the reformulation of a purely synthetic syntax? This article attempts to answer these and other questions relating to the sociological-aesthetic interferences that would influence the Parisian Cubist style of the war years, and in particular the works of Juan Gris, María Blanchard, Jacques Lipchitz and Jean Metzinger during the spring and summer that they shared with one another in 1918, until it consolidated into what we now know as Crystal Cubism. Contents Cubism and war. The beginning of the end or infinite renewal? At a crossroads: tradition, figuration, synthesis and abstraction The Beaulieu group, the purification of shape and the crystallization of Cubism in 1918 and 1919 Epilogue Cubism and war. The beginning of the end or infinite renewal? [1] The exhibition "Cubism and War: the Crystal in the Flame", held in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona in 2016,1 highlighted the renewed production undertaken in Paris during the war years by a small circle of artists who succeeded in taking Synthetic Cubism to its ultimate consequences. 1 Cubism and War: the Crystal in the Flame, ed. Christopher Green, exh. cat., Museo Picasso, Barcelona, Barcelona 2016. RIHA Journal 0250 | 02 September 2020 [2] Linking the concepts of war and the avant-garde, or rather, the effects that the former had on the latter, is by no means novel. Undoubtedly a pioneering work on this issue, Kenneth Silver’s well-known publication 2 laid the foundations for a deeper understanding of the dismemberment of the very idea of a Parisian avant-garde in those years. Silver’s work examined how the avant- garde was undermined by the disruption of the conditions that had made it possible, namely the cosmopolitanism and artistic-cultural liberalism that the French capital had boasted from the end of the 19th century; these had allowed impressionists and post-impressionists to disassociate themselves from the established art circuit, and had opened the doors to the avid – and for the most part, destitute – foreign bohemians who gradually began congregating in the area between the Bateau Lavoir of Montmartre and the Ruche of Montparnasse. [3] Silver’s initial contribution was subsequently followed by others which have delved into the consequences of the First World War insofar as the arts are concerned. It is an idea that is always present in the texts of Christopher Green,3 the curator of the exhibition at the Picasso Museum; his in-depth exploration of certain particularly relevant questions in that exhibition deserves further consideration. [4] The first and most obvious one is the title of the exhibition and what it alludes to. The metaphor of the crystalline to refer to certain Cubist works is by no means novel; Maurice Raynal, Amedée Ozenfant and Jeanneret – Le Corbusier – made use of it to allude to the work of Braque and Picasso in 1912, which seemed to shatter into small shards of glass.4 Green however, ever since his early texts and following in the footsteps of Maurice Raynal and Albert Gleizes, has recycled the term in order to refer to the very specific production of Cubist art by a group of artists in Paris during the war years, whose coming together is an intrinsic result and consequence of the armed conflict. 5 On one 2 Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de corps: the Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925, Princeton, N.J. 1989. 3 Particularly in Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies. Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art 1916–1918, New Haven / London 1987, and id., Art in France 1900–1940, New Haven / London 2000. I would not wish to fail to mention the contributions in this regard by Philippe Dagen, Le silence des peintres. Les artistes face à la Grande Guerre, Paris 1976 and by Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton 1993, both of which are fundamental, I believe, to any approach to these issues. 4 Amedée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, "Vers le cristal", in: L'Esprit Nouveau 25 (July 1924), n.p. 5 By 1925, Gleizes was already claiming that it was Gris and Metzinger who made the greatest effort to delve into the possibilities offered by this new path, in a text that was however published a few years later: Albert Gleizes, "L'Epopée, de la forme immobile à la forme mobile", in: Le Rouge et le noir, (October 1929), 81. Raynal himself, in a RIHA Journal 0250 | 02 September 2020 hand, the term refers to the perception of their works as having "a sharp clarity and the serene balance of a crystalline structure".6 At the same time, the title "crystal in the flame" refers to a Cubism scorched by the war disaster, and looking for a new starting point. [5] I cannot agree more. In previous texts I have already defended the idea that Cubism did not end with Picasso leaving for Avignon and Braque marching off to the front, and that the production of Cubist art before the war was not something unique to Kahnweiler's four inescapable artists. I have also maintained – and I believe that this is the most important point – that Synthetic Cubism can in no way be limited to the meagre production created by Braque, Picasso and Gris in 1913 and 1914, which by and large involved transferring to the canvas what they had learned from collages and papiers collés.7 Not only somewhat later publication, would affirm that as far as Metzinger was concerned, Crystal Cubism represented a return to a simpler and more emphatic art; Maurice Raynal, Modern French Painters, New York 1934, 125. Green uses the analogy for the first time in Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven / London 1976, 130-131. He then retrieves it for Cubism and its Enemies, 25-37 and then again in "The Crystal in the Flame. Cubism and the First World War", in: Cubism and War: the Crystal in the Flame, ed. Christopher Green, exh. cat., Museo Picasso, Barcelona, Barcelona 2016, 9-33. 6 Green, "The Crystal in the Flame", 9. 7 The division between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, with the latter understood as a double and simultaneous creative process, arises in the first place from the writings of Maurice Raynal, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Juan Gris in the early 1920s; s. Maurice Raynal, Quelques intentions du cubisme, Paris 1919; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, Munich 1920, 39-40; and Vauvrecy [Juan Gris], "Juan Gris", in: L’Esprit Nouveau 5 (February 1921), 533-534. A few months later, Waldemar Georges took up this same idea when talking about Gris’ work, s. Waldemar Georges, "Juan Gris", in: L'amour de l'art (November 1921), 351-352: 352. The writings of that same year by Léonce Rosenberg, Cubisme et empirisme, Paris 1921, or Elie Faure, Histoire de l'art, 3, Paris 1921, 458, consolidate the idea of this double process which, through contamination, began to be used to distinguish the artistic production of two different chronological periods: the analytical one between 1907 and 1912 and the synthetic one between 1913 and 1914. This distinction appeared for the first time in an anonymous letter dedicated to Picasso, which already alluded to "les années heroïques du cubisme": Anonymous, "Hommage à Picasso", in: Documents 2 (1930), 180-182, and which Gamwell attributes to Carl Einstein. See Lynn Gamwell, Cubism Criticism, Michigan 1980, 106. The division is consolidated in the collective imaginary based on Alfred Barr’s paradigmatic writing for the exhibition catalogue on cubism and abstract art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Cubism & Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 1936. The writings for the exhibitions organised in later years by the Museum of Modern Art itself and dedicated to Kahnweiler's cubists, such as Picasso, Forty Years of his Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 1939, 21; Picasso, Fifty Years of his Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 1946, 66 and RIHA Journal 0250 | 02 September 2020 did Cubism have a second life, but it was during that second life that Cubism went from being apparent to fully synthetic; that it took on this crystalline appearance, as discussed below. [6] This claim, which grants Synthetic Cubism a greater depth and sophistication than is apparent at first glance, requires taking into account another paramount issue, without which it is unlikely that this development would ever have occurred. With the outbreak of the First World War, the groups of artists who were apparently consolidated around a dealer, a movement or a gallery, dissolved, obliging those who remained in what was by now a sadly dilapidated Paris, to reorganise. And that is what happened to Cubism. On the eve of the war, Braque’s and Picasso’s absence from the Parisian art scene had made their work less questioned in the art press, as happenned also with Gris and Léger after their alliance with Kahnweiler. The art critics close to them, like Salmon and Allard, championed them as leaders of Cubism, while the Salon Cubists, generally reviled by the press, were considered to be of lower rank.
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